This leads to a lot of amusing, sometimes infuriating cultural conflicts. I frequently have this type of conversation with colleagues in my profession, and it's frustrating to see all the technocratic utopianism and narrowly conceived TEDdie-ism that often obtains on the other side.
Lately, I've resorted to making the point about mindfulness and purpose through the compact vehicle of jest, since business interactions seldom organically accommodate discussion of serious ideas and issues. In our hipster age of sham social capital, deniable low-calorie intellectual commitments, and instant disavowal of anything that begets complications down the road, oblique jokes seem to work better than direct critiques.
Something like:
- Client: "Our server has had five-nines uptime this past year!"
- Me: "But was it running good stuff?"
- Client: "What?"
- Me: "What's better, a highly available server sitting idle or running crap, or a less reliable server running good stuff? Quality over quantity, right?"
- Client: "Uhhh..."
- Me: "Think about it. Is the measure of a server really in how long it's been running? The essence of a server is that it serves, yeah? Availability is a secondary—if important—quality."
- Client: "... okay ...?"
- Me: "So, it's not enough to just be up. The host has to run good stuff. Has the server been running good stuff?"
- Client: "Erm... it runs our middleware? Are you asking if it's good code?"
- Me: "No, I'm asking if it's a good thing to run, although I suppose for a thing to be good to run, it has to be written well enough. Bad code doesn't run well."
- Client: "WTF?"
- Me: "Is your middleware good stuff?"
- Client: "What does that even mean?"
- Me: "Doesn't it bother you that you don't know?"
- Client: "... I guess I never really thought about it like that."
It's what I encourage everyone to do. Bring a little ancient Greece to the cloud data centre.